Image credit: EyesOnALZ
Together with collaborators at Cornell,
Berkeley, and Princeton, and with support from the BrightFocus Foundation, the Human Computation Institute (HCI) has created the first
citizen science project to fight Alzheimer’s – EyesOnALZ. This project enables everyone to contribute to Alzheimer’s
disease research and speed up drug discovery by playing Citizen Science Games -
games that let players contribute to real scientific research.
Their first game, Stall
Catchers, is celebrating 1 year birthday in October.
The team is cooking up some graphics to illustrate its main milestones &
the achievements of its community during the last 12 months. But for now, they
would like to acknowledge the Catchers of the year at http://blog.eyesonalz.com/stall-catchers-1-bday/.
Stall Catchers is a “Serious
Game” designed to help researchers at Cornell University to search the brain
for stalled blood vessels that may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.
The Science
It has long been known that reduced blood flow
in the brain is associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of
dementia. However, new imaging techniques have only recently enabled project
collaborators at the Schaffer-Nishimura
Lab (Cornell University) to make important
discoveries about the mechanisms that underlie this reduced blood flow.
For instance, one such cause seems to be
capillaries becoming clogged by white blood cells. By sticking to the inside
walls of blood vessels, white blood cells cause “stalls” – instances where
blood is no longer flowing. It seems that around 2% of the tiniest blood
vessels in the brain can become stalled in Alzheimer’s, causing up to 30%
reduction in overall blood flow. This is likely to contribute to further
disease progression and typical Alzheimer’s symptoms.
In fact, the researchers at the Schaffer-Nishimura
Lab have recently demonstrated that
reversing stalls in mice also reduces Alzheimer’s symptoms, such as
cognitive decline and mood changes. But to get to the bottom of this process
& discover functional treatment target for humans there is a lot more work
to be done.
The Citizen Science
While the research at the Schaffer-Nishimura
Lab is promising, it is also incredibly
time-consuming. In fact, the data that takes about one hour to collect,
takes about a week for a trained scientist to analyze. At this rate, it could
take decades to find functional Alzheimer’s treatment candidates.
Fortunately, the data curation step, though
still too complicated for machines, involves perceptual tasks that are very
easy for humans. Stall Catchers crowdsources the data analysis to the general public through
a game-like activity, to drastically speed up the research.
While playing the game, you’ll be looking at
real movies of live mouse brain. You will be given one vessel to annotate per
movie, and will do so by searching for signs of blood flow or stalls.
“Vessel movies” here are played back using a special tool – the Virtual
Microscope (VM).
Screenshots from the Stall Catchers game
In Stall
Catchers, the Virtual Microscope allows participants to look into
successive layers of brain tissue, where different blood vessels come in and
out of view, and search for “stalls” – clogged capillaries where blood is no
longer flowing. By “catching stalls,” players build up their score, level up,
and compete in the game leaderboard, as well as receive digital badges for
their various achievements in the game.
Stall Catchers reduces the
time needed for each of these studies from years to weeks by enabling everyone
– regardless of their background or age – to contribute to the data analysis.
The Growing Field Of Citizen Science and PPSR
Source: Cornell University
Source: Cornell University
The growing field of Public Participation in Scientific
Research (PPSR) includes Citizen Science, volunteer monitoring, and other forms
of organized research in which members of the public engage in the process of
scientific investigations: asking
questions, collecting data, and/or interpreting results.
PPSR collaborations yield new knowledge by
providing access to more and different observations and data than traditional
science research. PPSR often focuses on a question or issue that requires data
to be gathered or processed over long periods of time and/or wide geographic
areas. Although projects vary in the degree of collaboration between science
researchers and volunteers, in most projects volunteers receive some degree of
training in project procedures to ensure consistency in data collection and
accuracy in data analysis.
Over the past few years several models for PPSR
have been developed to meet varied goals. All models share the same basic
strategy, however, in which volunteers collect and share data that can be
analyzed by scientists, project participants, or both.
PPSR projects have achieved notable outcomes
for both science and education. In recent years over one hundred articles have
been published, in peer-reviewed scientific literature that analyze and draw
significant conclusions from volunteer-collected data. Many articles and book
chapters describing learning outcomes for participants also have been
published. Numerous publications document action outcomes as well, and offer
strategies for linking research findings with management and decision making in
different contexts.
Designing PPSR projects to achieve specific
goals is not a simple process. Ensuring that projects will be meaningful to all
participants, that project data will be collected accurately, that data will be
analyzed with rigor, and that project results will be communicated to
participants and to the greater scientific community all take careful planning
and “intentional design.”